More Naive Than Nazi

A portrait of an average, everyday Neo-Nazi, The White World According to Daliborek illustrates East-Central European ennui in the form of a gently ironic documentary.

The White World According To Daliborek

Vit Klusák

CZ. SK. UK. 2017, 105 minutes

Pathos stalks the world of white supremacist Daliborek from the opening frame of Vit Klusák’s sympathetically drawn portrait of a Czech racist. The sympathy is not for Daliborek’s revolting beliefs, but for the poor sinner himself.

Welcome to Hell

Fuzzy webcam images of a tall, slightly pudgy man sitting in a nondescript, cheaply furnished room with an open laptop, introduce us to the cyberworld of Daliborek. Wearing a black leather waistcoat, a dead giveaway that he inhabits fashion hell as well as other hells, Dalibor (as he prefers to be known) uses a voice synthesizer to address his audience in gratingly devilish tones.

«Klusák’s film–made with not only the cooperation, but approval of its subject–wastes little time in establishing the frugal frames of this white, working class (if not exactly underclass) man’s world.»

“Welcome to hell…” He is the master of all he surveys; the lord of a world accessed via his computer screen. In a cut-away shot we see that his webcast has had all of 187 views, giving us a clue to where this gently ironic documentary (at times it seems more mockumentary) is headed.

https://vimeo.com/223171521

The White World According to Daliborek, produced by Prague’s Hypermarket Films, is from a director who was part of the team that delighted audiences in 2004 with their debut documentary Czech Dream, about the all-pervading emptiness of the Czechs’ enthusiastic embrace of consumer capitalism after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 saw the collapse of communism.

Diving into the strange world of sad loner Dalibor is essentially part of that same trajectory: what becomes of a country and its people when a monolithic system collapses, especially a people whose thin history as a sovereign nation gives them little in the way of stable roots?

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